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Off The Map Discussion Board for Christians, Atheists and People In-between
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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 Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 10:23 am Post subject: Siamang's life story |
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Awhile back I did an online Q and A with Darci here at Off The Map. I think the plan was to run it with other members Q and A's, but then they opted for guest hosting instead.
I plan to run this Q and A myself here, as it kind of tells about me. |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 10:25 am Post subject: |
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I can start with some background about myself.
I'd like to keep myself under the pseudonym Siamang for now. It's just a rule I have when I'm in online discussions about religion or politics. I've just seen people take things kind of strangely, and think that personal privacy is not off-limits when they read something they disagree with.
I don't like using a pseudonym, and I think it leads to a barrier in communication. But I'm just a bit cautious. I hope you'll understand.
I chose the name Siamang because I love the gibbons at the LA Zoo. No real reason except that I like those apes and I like the way the word sounds.
A bit about me, I'm 39 years old, been married almost 10 years now and we have a 2-year-old daughter. I live in the Los Angeles area and I'm an animator at a company that produces family entertainment.
My wife currently stays home, but she may return to the workforce at least part time in a few years.
My attention is focused between my family and my work, and luckily the company I work for is very family-centered. I of course wish I had more time for extended family and friends, but a two-year-old can be an attention tyrant. We pour our daily stamina into caring for her. Hopefully soon it'll get easier!
My wife and I are both atheists in the sense that neither of us worships a deity. I have an agnostic approach. My wife has I think a belief closer to deism. We have not discussed the ideas of religion with our daughter yet. We expect to raise her with a cultural awareness of religion. She will be exposed to religion, and we will not attempt to hide it from her, that's simply not possible.
My feeling is, her soul is her own, her journey will be her own. I cannot make any decisions for her. We will raise her in our home, with all the love we can muster. We will share with her our opinions, feelings and experiences regarding religion, but her decisions are her own.
I am much more concerned with raising a moral child than I am with raising an atheist. If she grows up to be a moral, good, kind, loving Christian, I will be the proudest atheist you ever met! |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 10:28 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | How did you happen to find the otm atheist blog? What attracted you to it? What drew you to start posting on it? What do you like/dislike about it? |
Well, I frequent the Internet Infidel's bulletin board, and someone had posted about Hemant's ebay auction. So I followed it from the auction over to here. I thought it was a funny idea, more like a publicity stunt fundraiser for Hemant's Secular Student Alliance than a "real" act of positive atheist activism or outreach. When Off the Map had won, I started reading around their site and was pleasantly surprised. For awhile I just posted on Hemant's blog, but then as I read more and more on the OTM-Atheist blog, I found that it was a much better forum for my thoughts. I've found it to be a really inspirational place to be part of a dialogue of people who speak and listen more openly than anywhere else I've seen on the internet.
| Quote: | | How did you decide to become an Atheist? (do you 'become' an Atheist? I think I just use this language because we 'become' Christians...or do you just choose it?) |
As an atheist, I don't assign any particular magical wording to the process. Anything I do, I "decide" to do. I have noticed people of faith "become" or "open their heart to" or "feel moved to" things. I cannot claim anything supernatural about my thinking process. It seems so mundane to me in comparison!
The point I was at was about 25 years old, in college. Living with my grandparents. Believing in a belief-set I'll capsulize with the words "Shirley MacLaine." New age beliefs.
But still a lot in common with christianity. I believed in a creator God who created the universe. I believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ. I believed in the immortality of the human soul. I believed in a God who was a personal confidant, and interacted daily in miraculous ways with His children. And I believed that love and morality were God's central message for us.
I can't tell you exactly what it was going on in my life that caused my change in thinking from that. I sometimes think that these changes happen and we just assign them to big events in our lives that are happening at the same time. But the big thing was, my grandmother died.
She died of lung cancer, in the hospital. And I was there, sitting with her, holding her hand when she died.
It's in that moment that mortality ceased being a theoretical concept.
If you've never been with someone when they died, I'll tell you what you do, you watch them. You watch their eyes for any sign of relief or revelation. You wonder if at the instant of death, you'll see a flicker of the life beyond reflected in their eyes.
Well, I can tell you, it's nothing like the movies. Nothing happened. No magical moment of release or awe. Death is, at its core, ultimately a physical process. The one thing I was utterly struck by was how completely non-spiritual the entire process is. Not to be gross, but It was like a bowel movement: A thing so utterly real and mundanely physiological that I simply could not attribute a spiritual meaning to it. It was the least spiritual thing I'd ever witnessed. It was a physical thing, blunt and forceful and completely without meaning. It was like dropping your car keys--no deep philosophy, no esoteric intellectual rationalization, no moment of psychic clarity-- just the time before and the time after, and the difference between the two.
So I came away with that and dealing with the terrible grief for the loss of my grandmother, whom I loved to the core. Since my childhood, she was probably my favorite person. It's a painful thing to lose such a part of ones life. I think I had to get past the rawest part of that pain before I could reassess my beliefs. But I think that all the pieces were in motion at that point.
I kept dealing with her death, and the idea of death in general. As I dealt with it, I felt that it was terrible how death is hidden in our society. We have these gatekeepers who keep us away and explain the whole thing. We had a minister speak at her funeral, and he explained the whole thing. Only he wasn't there. I was. I was the one who held her hand, and kept telling her I loved her as she passed. The minister wasn't there. He didn't know or have any idea, any better than I did as to what happened to her in that moment.
I think that in a year or two from that point, it all had to come down for me. Just the whole elaborate tabernacle of religion had to come down, because I saw in that moment that nobody knew anything. People made it their profession to say they know. They read ancient books, and prayed, and said they had the answers. But I could tell, they didn't know more than I did. And they said "oh yes, I know. I have deep understanding of the Truth of God." and all the while I could see right through them. It was like a four year old child saying "I understand all about calculus." Many of them FELT they knew, and the more self-assured they seemed, the more I could tell that they hadn't a clue.
Around this time, I heard a quote by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry when asked if he believed in God. He said "No, I'm not superstitious."
I thought that was a preposterous, hubristic thing to say. I also thought it might be a good way to cheeze off any fundamentalists who might yell at me while witnessing on a streetcorner, so I filed it away.
But it kept gnawing at me. "Not superstitious? Well, that's really a foolish thing to say. After all, everyone knows that black cats aren't really bad luck. But it's a long way from there to believing in God." So I worked on that one, mentally. What WAS the difference, I wondered, between a superstition and a faith? The amount of time that people have been believing it? The number of people who share the belief? No, those cannot be valid. A truth has to be a truth, newly discovered or ancient, popular or unknown. So what is it?
So I started a deliberate process of disassembling my beliefs. Evaluating them. What did I know, and what didn't I know. Weeding out superstition from fact. One by one I shredded layers of belief accumulated by years of living with my parents. Subjecting each of them to a rigorous test of a requirement for evidence.
I started with easier nonsense: Black cats, breaking mirrors...
Went through hokum like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster..
Evaluated the evidence for UFO's and found it utterly lacking.
Went through psychic powers, esp, tarot cards, astrology....
All of them fail every double-blind test you can apply. Obviously just believer self-confirmation going on there.
Then got to the hard stuff. Religious revelation, prayer efficacy.... when I got right to it, I couldn't say that those weren't just the same stuff as believer self-confirmation I was seeing in the world of psychics, at least as far as my personal experience was. Other people said they heard God, and were convinced. But then again, other people said their Uncle Jerome was abducted by aliens.
So I came to a philosophical point: I decided that to have an open mind about the question of God, I had to be open to three possibilities: God exists in a way that an earthly religion describes, God exists in a way that no earthly religion describes, God doesn't exist.
I was pretty sure, at that point, that I had no compelling evidence that the first one was true. So I had to be honest with myself and say that my search for God, was to begin in earnest. Not to follow another person who claims he's found God,and read more books about someone else's personal journey of change, and really I just need faith and follow along. I had to admit that I never found God in the writings of men. Ironically I had to lose god, the god given to me by the beliefs I was brought up in, to really seek Him.
Who knows what I'll find! |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 10:29 am Post subject: |
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| More installments to come. |
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Keith
Joined: 04 May 2006
Posts: 187
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 2:27 pm Post subject: |
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Siamang,
Thank you for sharing so personally ... earlier this year I watched my friend Charlie as he was dying ... your phrase "just the time before and the time after, and the difference between the two" puts it about as well as I have ever heard ... thank you for articulating that feeling ... I have never been able to say it ... that helps
"Ironically I had to lose god, the god given to me by the beliefs I was brought up in, to really seek Him. " Well said. Thanks again, Siamang |
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Esther
Joined: 21 Apr 2006
Posts: 20
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 7:31 pm Post subject: |
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Siamang wrote:
| Quote: | | Ironically I had to lose god, the god given to me by the beliefs I was brought up in, to really seek Him. |
Wow! This can be my motto for now! Indeed, very well said and it is sadly true!
Siamang, I've just posted some of my thinking lately here:
http://off-the-map.org/ebayatheist/viewtopic.php?t=235
Reading your life story had enriched my mind. It did make me understand a lot more of your journey. Thanks. |
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Esther
Joined: 21 Apr 2006
Posts: 20
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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Sorry, I don't know how to direct people to the exect blog.
Siamang, the link I paste in the previous message will direct you to the first introduction of mine. But, I have also entered some of my thoughts just this afternoon. So, if you are interested, find the one entered on May 24th afternoon. Thanks. |
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Eliza
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 800
Location: Seattle WA
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 8:46 pm Post subject: |
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Siamang, thanks.
I had asked you in a PM a few weeks back about your background, as you so are able to so clearly present, and you clearly enjoy, scientific info. As I recall, this was something you developed on your own...could you tell us more about this? When and how did you develop your interest in science?
And, I really like the way you put this: | Quote: | | ...to have an open mind about the question of God, I had to be open to three possibilities: God exists in a way that an earthly religion describes, God exists in a way that no earthly religion describes, God doesn't exist. |
I like that way of laying out the possibilities. Thanks! |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 9:29 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the thoughts, Eliza. I've enjoyed reading your journey as well.
I always had an interest in science. In my family it was always taught as a virtue. But from a very young age my science understanding passed everyone in my family. Nobody in my family had a college education, and so my interest in space exploration, dinosaurs, (boy stuff!) kept me reading.
As I grew up, the books just got more in-depth. I read Hawking's A brief History of time in college, and saw Professor Hawking deliver a presentation on black holes and baby universes. That was like a rock concert for me. I stood in line for 7 hours to get into that one!
My mother worked for a satellite contractor, and so the space shuttle was a big part of our lives back in the 80's. |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 9:31 pm Post subject: |
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okay, more questions and answers.
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~Were there any challenges in choosing Atheism? |
I think there are challenges in any philosophical model. Coming to grips with mortality is a beast. It's really a huge deal. But I cope! I think the twin bugbears of atheists are mortality and the idea that you are without a divine protector. BOOM Hurricane Katrina might come and kill your whole family.
How do you live a life without paralyzing fear, believing that no god is protecting you, and you're one rusty nail from oblivion?
I don't know, really. But I do quite well nevertheless.
Ultimately I think fear of one's mortality is self-centered. So I'm working on being more selfless. The more selfless I am, the better I'll be equipped to deal with the thought of not existing. It's probably a good thing.
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~Did you grow up in a home where religion was practiced? If so, did it or did it not have any bearing on your choice to become an Atheist? |
I think it may have delayed it. But I don't know.
My parents are divorced. I lived with my mother. She had a general non-denominational Christian belief. She has since become a Methodist. My father and his wife are Unity Church members, and they believe a sort of Unitarian/earth mother/new age belief. I accepted their beliefs as true until I got through college. There was a point in my childhood when I had read a work of dispensationalist fiction (a sort of circa 1980 version of the Left-Behind series) and had a couple of years of rapture-readyness. I eventually left that behind(!) when I realized it was making me an angry sort of person, and I didn't like that I was categorizing all the people in my life into two little piles: the saved and the firewood. You could still call me a Christian after that, but the fire and brimstone had cooled.
The thing was, in my life at that point, I didn't have pre-conceptions about religion. Religion was fact, as taught in my house. The bible was True, just as Gravity was true, or that George Washington was the first president. So I didn't have any tools for dealing with the book of Revelation, especially as painted in the popular fiction in the world of "The Omen" and the apocalyptic book whose title I can't recall.
Going from dispensationalist christian, to nondenomnational christian, to new-ager. Really looking and honestly seeking, really weaving my life around a spiritual search. Going to a lot of survey of world religions classes. Trying to read philosophy. Practically living at the Bohdi Tree Bookstore, which is legendary in new-age circles.
My entire philosophical journey could be sliced into smaller and smaller wedges of time, and to look upon it now it seems strange. What a sea of differing beliefs I was swimming in, all piled on by my parents. You never could easily encapsulate my beliefs into a set of them. There was always something else poking in, some pesky vestigal part of another belief system forcing me to always re-evaluate.
I guess atheism allows me to pooh-pooh it all, and shove it all away, but as you can see by my involvement here, I haven't done that. I guess it's my nature to continue to seek.
| Quote: |
~Are there different 'kinds' or types of Atheism? How would you describe yourself as an Atheist? |
I think there are. I would call some people areligious, I'm sure there's lots of people who never really think about religion. Atheists who think about this stuff generally categorize themselves by how they came to atheism, what thought-process guided them. I spoke with a friend today who used to be quite the born-again and he shared with me that the problem for church for him was that religion had no tools for him to deal in a real, emotional way with some severe psychological pain he was having. He kept seeking in the church, for a way to deal with the pain, and they kept laying scripture on him. He felt emotionally starved, and said that what he really needed was community, but that the church was a community that didn't have the tools or the time to give him the deep emotional support he needed. He described his coming to atheism as an emotional journey, not a logical one, away from a church that offered "answers" but no help.
I'd call myself an "agnostic atheist," meaning I don't follow a god because I don't have compelling evidence to believe a personal god interacts with my life. Some folks call themselves "brights." I hate the name, but I use the philosophy, which seeks to place the burden of proof of an extraordinary claim on the claimant. It's a personal philosophy that answers "Nice claim--Prove it." to all comers with quack remedies, chakra aligners, benders of spoons and pet psychics.
Those are claims I am technically agnostic about, but practically skeptical of. |
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tlindholtz
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 148
Location: Sacramento, CA
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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| Siamang wrote: | | .... I read Hawking's A brief History of time in college, and saw Professor Hawking deliver a presentation on black holes and baby universes. That was like a rock concert for me. ... |
Another point of similarity. I got to hear Hawking speak on my birthday a couple years ago. The university I work at hosted an international physics symposium, and Hawkin spoke. It was incredible! I think the thing that surprised me most (other than the fact that I understood most of what he was talking about) was his sense of humor. He is a funny guy. And somehow, in reading his two books, I had never picked up on that or even imagined it.
Big thanks, too, for sharing your story. Really enjoying it. |
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tlindholtz
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 148
Location: Sacramento, CA
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 11:02 pm Post subject: |
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Siamang wrote:
| Quote: | I think there are challenges in any philosophical model. Coming to grips with mortality is a beast. It's really a huge deal. But I cope! I think the twin bugbears of atheists are mortality and the idea that you are without a divine protector. BOOM Hurricane Katrina might come and kill your whole family.
How do you live a life without paralyzing fear, believing that no god is protecting you, and you're one rusty nail from oblivion?
I don't know, really. But I do quite well nevertheless. |
That is interesting. I have to admit, I hardly ever give a thought to heaven or Hell or mortality. Perhaps it is because of the "built in" nature of the eternal life aspects of Christianity. I don't know. All I can say is that reading this was a shock to me. It never occured to me.
But it does raise the question. When you say that you do quite well, do you mean that in a "whistling past the cemetary" sense? Or do you mean it in the "neutral" sense of having come to peace with your own non-existence; "It's just the way life is"? Or do you mean it in a more "positive" sense of seeing it as a part of some great cycle that perpetuates future life somehow?
Having never spent much time thinking about it, I am just struck by the idea. Thanks. |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 11:25 pm Post subject: |
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I bounce back and forth through all 3 of them.
Having a daughter helps with the personal mortality issue. I have been forced to become far less self-centered! And that's got to be good! |
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Eliza
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 800
Location: Seattle WA
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| Posted: Thu May 25, 2006 11:26 am Post subject: |
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| Siamang and Tom (and everyone) - I'm going to start a "How Do you think about your own mortality" discussion under "Life without Gods"...prompted by your comments here |
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Siamang
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1144
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| Posted: Thu May 25, 2006 12:06 pm Post subject: |
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New installment:
| Quote: |
| Quote: | | ~"Ironically, I had to lose god, the god given to me by my beliefs I was brought up in, to really seek him." |
I've noticed in reading some of your blog posts that you have a high respect for what may be 'out there'--only ruling out those things that can be proven. I have realized my own ignorance about how I thought all Atheists saw things when I read some of your posts...you are actually more respectful toward "God" and what he may be, than some Christians I know.
~You said that it is in your nature to continue to seek...how is that going for you? Do you think most Atheists continue to ask questions/seek?
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Thanks for the kind thoughts. Do I think most atheists continue to seek and question? Well, that depends on the atheist. I think MOST atheists, just like most people of all types, don't continue to weigh and reweigh their beliefs. I think that people's beliefs change based on non-rational thinking. I don't mean that as a dig against it, on the contrary. I think the most important decisions we make in our lives are made emotionally, not rationally. Who we marry, whether and how many children we have, those things we "feel" our way through. We don't do a cost/benefit analysis, and if people did we'd call them pretty heartless! I think faith/belief is similar for most people. When they change faith, they do it based on emotion. I think emotion's role in faith is to the credit of faith, it solidifies it in the life of the believer as one of the most important aspects of their being.
I'm somewhat different, because I'm attempting to deal with these questions rationally. I think that's why my flavor of atheist looks so different to people of faith, because I'm kind of like that heartless guy who made a cost/benefit analysis before deciding to get married! I don't think I'm heartless, it's just that I feel like people's choice of faith has more to do with culture, their surroundings and their upbringing than what the specific faith brings to the table.
99.99% of Americans will marry another American. And in the same way, 99.99% of Americans will choose the faith that was their parents. It has more to do with environment, I think. I visited Japan recently and was told by my tour guide that the population of Japan was 99% Buddhist and 99% Shinto. Japanese believe in a combined form of the two. I imagined it was quite an eye-opener for the other Americans on the tour, to realize that almost the entire nation had a different religion. How strange to visit a nation that had a Starbucks and an AM-PM on every streetcorner, but no churches!
As far as my searching, well, I'm kind of coming at the question like a naturalist. As part of that philosophy, I have to always say I'm looking, hopefully I'm being honest with myself when I'm saying that. I see a tremendous amount of wonder in the universe, and I cannot discount that. But I nevertheless do not take the existence of beauty, love, honor and chocolate as evidence for any of the particular schools of religious thought. The Buddhist also claims the wonder of nature as proof of the correctness of his philosophy. All religions hold up the wonders of nature and thank their own particular God. Can I say, without offending, that to me their idols and cathedrals look puny next to a quasar or a volcano or even the wonders of the tiniest virus?
There is a school of thought among atheists currently, a sort of methodological naturalism. It's I think a new movement in atheism, one which casts the atheist as an honest seeker. This school of thought says basically "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." We color ourselves agnostic to the question of God until such time as the evidence causes us to evaluate the question in the positive or the negative. Evidence of a miracle would have to be sufficiently compelling to rule out more mundane explanations.
I've heard it explained this way: Suppose someone said "I have $50 in my pocket, in cash, right now." You wouldn't question it. If that same person said he had $500, you'd think maybe he ought not to be carrying so much cash, but still, you wouldn't think he was very strange. If he said $5000, you'd wonder, and maybe look at his pockets to see if they were bulging. If he said he had $500,000,000, in cash, in his pockets, you'd think he was absolutely loco, and you would require him to show you before you believed him. And you'd think there was no possible way he could be telling the truth, even if he was a millionaire.
To me, when a religious person claims they have the correct religion, and they point to the wonders of nature as proof, well.... It's like someone saying they've got half a billion dollars in their pocket, and they say that the existence of the hope diamond is proof that they're rich. "Oh, yeah, the hope diamond exists, but I own it. I've got me an invisible deed in my pocket that claims its riches as my own."
Now, as part of my philosophy, I not only ask people to empty out their pockets when they make an outrageous claim, I also check my own pockets. I want to be sure I'm as honest with myself as I can be. Hopefully I am. |
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